About Tree & Leaf

Contact

If my research has been helpful in any way,
or if you have something to add, or a photo to share,
or any other comments or corrections,
I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Rationale & Approach

Over the past few years, I have spent a considerable amount of time working on my family tree. I've learned a lot about my family, uncovered wonderful and terrible stories, met many beautiful cousins, and gradually pieced together a puzzle that has not always been obvious.

Most of my research is stored in a public tree at Ancestry.com. (Public means you can view it if you have an active Ancestry subscription, or else, free of charge with an invitation. (Feel free to ask for an invitation.) I have "painted with broad brush strokes," working to craft the story of my family, my wife's family, and some connected families, over the course of many generations. My desire has been to recover a legacy that I can share with my children, and also with you.

Publishing online offers some distinct advantages over print, or even a PDF document that can be shared. For one thing, this work is made available to a larger group of people, especially cousins, who may not otherwise discover it. What I publish here can offer a richer experience than print—I am thinking of hyperlinks, of course—but also the inclusion of media and resources that would not be practical to include in a book format. I also find working with html easier than futzing with styles in a Word Processor.

Recent generations are omitted for the sake of privacy.
Source citations are selective. More infomation may be available by request.
Everything is a work in progress.

Website features & Tools

The last modified date at top of page shows when a page was changed. This is helpful to see if you there is a new version.

A table of contents is automatically generated from headings on the page.

When you click a note reference, the corresponding note is highlighted.

You can easily search the site from the homepage. (This just refers you to a site-specific search on Google.)

Some images make use of the "OpenSeaDragon" open-source viewer. This allows zooming and panning, and also higher-resolution versions of an image to served as an image is enlarged.

Tools at the top of each page may include:

• · This always takes you to the home page
• · Enable highlights. This allows you to create highlights that can be shared (by copying the URL) or printed. To activate the highlights, click the button or press SHIFT + SHIFT.
• · Toggle notes. This reveals (or hides) all notes on a page with one click. To print a page with all notes displayed, sources, make sure to toggle them open before printing. You can also use the left ← or right → arrow key to toggle these open or closed, or click on the arrow to open an individual notes section.
•  · Invert colors. It is occasionally useful to view documents black-on-white.
• · Return to Previous page or section. This may be helpful after clicking a footnote or a header in table of contents menu.

I've tried to design the website so that pages are easily and neatly printed. If you'd like all the notes printed with the text, make sure they are expanded before printing, otherwise they will be hidden.

Acknowledgements

Many, many people have helped with this work in many ways. Thank you!

Colophon

This website was built with CraftCMS, using HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery (not all features will be supported in older browsers).

It utilizes nginx and Ubuntu on a Linode VPS.

Type is set in »Vollkorn« by Friedrich Althausen (vollkorn-typeface.com) and FontAwesome for icons.

The website also makes use of a variety of open source projects including: OpenSeadragon, MediaElement.js, PDF.js, DataTables, Ben Crowder’s Emperor.js, and a customized version of Emphasis.js from the New York Times.

It also make use of some icons from the Noun Project by Housin Aziz, Emily Haasch, Zlatko Najdenovski, Creative Stall, and Ralf Schmitzer.